Winners Announced in 2009 Collegiate Inventors Competition(R)

Two grand prize winners have innovations related to cell engineering and tools
for quadriplegics

CHICAGO, Oct. 21 /PRNewswire/ -- A faster tool for cell programming and a new
way of allowing quadriplegics to perform simple tasks have won grand prizes of
the 2009 Collegiate Inventors Competition, a program of the National Inventors
Hall of Fame sponsored by the Abbott Fund, the non-profit foundation of the
global health care company Abbott, and the United States Patent and Trademark
Office (USPTO). Harris Wang, who invented a new way of cell programming at
Harvard Medical School, and Stephen Diebold, who invented the Drop Point tool
for quadriplegics while at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
each received a $25,000 prize during the Competition's culminating ceremony
last night at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.

Graduate and undergraduate winners were also announced for their top work.
Graduate winner Geoffrey von Maltzahn of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology won for his advances in nanomedicine to increase the effectiveness
of cancer drugs, and the undergraduate team of Philip Wagner, Lindsay Holiday,
and Dana Leland of Dartmouth College won for their electrocoagulation arsenic
filter. As winners, von Maltzahn and the Dartmouth team each received a
$15,000 prize from the competition.

All student entries were scrutinized during an initial evaluation process by
over 20 experts from industry, government, and academic research who judged
the entries on the originality of the idea and the potential value and
usefulness of the invention to society. Then, on October 19th, nine chosen
finalists presented their inventions to a final panel of seven judges,
including five inductees from the National Inventors Hall of Fame and
representatives from the USPTO and Abbott.

James West, a final phase judge and an inductee in the National Inventors Hall
of Fame for his invention of the electret microphone, said, "Once again, we're
impressed by the outstanding caliber of the student inventions. We encourage
college students to celebrate invention as part of their science and
technology research, and we're also looking forward to seeing the impact of
their work as they progress. I know that all the judges join me in commending
these students."

The prominent group of judges for this year's competition includes five
National Inventors Hall of Fame inductees: C. Donald Bateman (Ground Proximity
Warning System), Robert Bower (self-aligned gate MOSFET), Edith Flanigen
(molecular sieves), Rangaswamy Srinivasan (excimer laser surgery), and James
West (electret microphone). In addition, the judging panel includes Jeffrey
Pan, Associate Director, Scientific Informatics and Automation, Global
Pharmaceutical Discovery from Abbott, and Jasemine Chambers, Group Director of
Industrial Design from the USPTO.

"Abbott is proud to again be part of this competition that showcases
innovation and fosters broader understanding of science," explained Jeffrey
Pan, Associate Director, Scientific Informatics and Automation, Global
Pharmaceutical Discovery, Abbott. "Through our support of the competition,
Abbott hopes to help inspire today's science students who may go on to find
tomorrow's cures and treatments for the world's most serious diseases and
health care challenges."

"The United States Patent and Trademark Office is pleased to be part of this
outstanding young inventor recognition program," USPTO Director David Kappos
commented. "Maintaining America's technological edge is vitally important in
today's world economy. The highly talented and creative collegiate inventors
who participated this year renew my confidence that this nation's innovative
tradition will continue to endure. I congratulate all of the 2009 winners and
wish them well in their future endeavors."

The graduate grand prize winner, Harris Wang, 26, is a student in the lab of
George Church, a researcher well-known for his attempts to make genetic
sequencing faster and cheaper. Church was long interested in creating faster
tools for cell programming and discovered that Wang was willing to take on the
challenge. Wang knew that cell programming was still a slow and hands-on
process. He developed a protocol designed to permit faster cell programming,
and then put together hardware and software to automate it. He calls the
approach MAGE: Multiplex Automated Genome Engineering.

To demonstrate, Wang engineered a strain of E. coli bacterium that produces
lycopene, a red-colored antioxidant. He added the genetic recipe for lycopene
to the bacterium's chromosome. Then he used his MAGE approach to evolve a
strain of the bacteria in which production of lycopene was highly efficient.
In a more traditional approach, researchers painstakingly isolate, snip apart,
reassemble, and reinsert individual genes. Wang believes that his technology
will allow bioengineers to produce customized microorganisms much more cheaply
and quickly than possible before. Such engineered microorganisms might be
used to produce a wide variety of useful compounds, such as antibiotics,
biofuels, and chemotherapy drugs. Born in China, Wang grew up in Salt Lake
City and is currently working towards his doctorate in biophysics.

Undergraduate grand prize winner Stephen Diebold, 21, from the Chicago suburb
of Rolling Meadows, designed an improved pointing stick for use by people with
quadriplegia and other disabilities that prevent them from using their arms.
Pointing sticks are used to type, operate cell phones, and otherwise
manipulate objects. Existing pointing sticks are gripped in the user's teeth
or mounted, helmet-like, on the user's head. Either approach presents
problems: a mouth-held pointer prevents the user from speaking and a
head-mounted pointer requires assistance to put on or take off.

Diebold's Drop Point stick is designed to be donned and doffed with a shrug of
the user's chin. He came up with the approach after spending time with
then-law student Jonathan Ko, who has quadriplegia. Diebold said, "I saw that
to Jonathan, the pointing stick was his arms and hands, and he had to ask
somebody every time he wanted to use his hands -- that seemed absurd to me."
By attaching the pointing stick to a cup which is in turn attached to a strap
that loops around the user's neck, the user is able to freely engage the
pointer as he wishes. Diebold is currently majoring in industrial design.

Graduate prize winner Geoffrey von Maltzahn, 29, turns what may be a new page
in nanomedicine with his method of using a pair of nanoparticles that work
together in an innovative way to increase the effectiveness and lower the side
effects of existing cancer drugs. Powerful cancer-killing drugs are
well-known to science and widely used in clinical medicine, but since these
drugs are also highly toxic to healthy cells, targeting drugs specifically to
tumors has been a major focus in cancer research. Of late, much of this
drug-targeting research has looked at using nanoparticles to carry the drugs
to tumors. A major challenge, however, is that cancer cells, and the tumors
they may form, have a finite numbers of targets to which nanoparticles can
attach -- and since a given nanoparticle can carry only a small drug payload,
this limits the amount of drug that can be delivered.

In von Maltzahn's approach, one set of nanoparticles lodge in a tumor's blood
vessels and cause local bleeding. The bleeding prompts clotting factors to be
produced, which in turn, attracts a second set of nanoparticles that have been
programmed to be attracted to the clotting factors and that deliver a cancer
drug. The use of the clotting factors dramatically increases the number of
targets for the drug-carrying particles. Raised first in Arlington, Texas and
then Fairfax, Virginia, von Maltzahn received degrees from MIT and the
University of California, San Diego before beginning his current work on a
Ph.D. in medical engineering and physics.

Undergraduate prize winners Philip Wagner, Lindsay Holiday, and Dana Leland
tackled the problem of reducing arsenic found in groundwater to safe levels,
with a cheap, reliable device made of materials locally available in rural
Nepal. The team developed a way of using electrocoagulation -- a process
employed in the large-scale water treatment plants of many modern cities -- in
a system radically downsized to fit into three five-gallon buckets. Water to
be treated goes into the first bucket where the students induce
electrocoagulation by sending a simple electric current through two steel
plates in the water. Iron precipitates are released. These iron particles
bond aggressively with the arsenic that exists in the water. This
newly-reacted water is then poured into a second bucket of clean sand, which
has a hole in the bottom and sits over a third empty bucket. The sand
collects the iron-arsenic particles and arsenic-free water collects in the
bottom bucket. When the team tested the device with water contaminated with
200 parts per billion (ppb) arsenic, the output water contained under 1ppb
arsenic -- well under the 10 ppb level considered safe for drinking.

Wagner, 22, grew up in Fogelsville, Pennsylvania; Holiday, 24, spent time
growing up in both Teec Nos Pos, Arizona in the Navajo Nation and Phoenix; and
Leland, 22, is from Baltimore. All three are Spring 2009 engineering
graduates of Dartmouth College.

About the Collegiate Inventors Competition
The Collegiate Inventors Competition, a program of the National Inventors Hall
of Fame, encourages college students to be active in science, engineering,
mathematics, technology, and creative invention. The Competition specifically
recognizes and rewards the innovations, discoveries, and research by college
and university students and their advisors for projects leading to inventions
that may have the potential of receiving patent protection. Introduced in
1990, the Competition has awarded more than $1 million to nearly 100 students
for their innovative work and scientific achievement through the help of its
sponsors. For more information on the Competition and past winners, visit
www.invent.org/collegiate.

About Abbott and the Abbott Fund
Abbott is a global, broad-based health care company devoted to the discovery,
development, manufacture and marketing of pharmaceuticals and medical
products, including nutritionals, devices and diagnostics. The company employs
more than 72,000 people and markets its products in more than 130 countries.

The Abbott Fund is a philanthropic foundation established by Abbott, a global,
broad-based health care company, in 1951. The Abbott Fund's mission is to
create healthier global communities by investing in creative ideas that
promote science, expand access to health care and strengthen communities
worldwide.

For more information about Abbott and the Abbott Fund, visit www.abbott.com
and www.abbottfund.org.

About United States Patent and Trademark Office
For over 200 years, the basic role of the USPTO has remained the same: to
promote the progress of science. Through the issuance of patents, the USPTO
encourages technological advancement by providing incentives to invent, invest
in, and disclose new technology worldwide. Through the registration of
trademarks, the agency assists businesses in protecting their investments,
promoting goods and services, and safeguarding consumers against confusion and
deception in the marketplace. By disseminating both patent and trademark
information, the USPTO promotes an understanding of intellectual property
protection and facilitates the development and sharing of new technologies
worldwide.

SOURCE National Inventors Hall of Fame

Rini Paiva, National Inventors Hall of Fame, +1-330-388-6160,
rpaiva@invent.org